Bitter Sweet - 3 - Sweet Taste of New Life

Today is Easter Sunday and we will be finishing our ‘Bitter Sweet’ series. Over the past two weeks we have been exploring at Jesus’ life. We have been looking at the high and low points of his live. We have also seen that throughout it all God has a plan.

Today we are going to be thinking about ‘the sweet taste of new life’.

We are going to start with a game, how many of these chocolates can you recognise?

The sweet moment that we are going to be focusing on today, the resurrection is a complete contrast from the bitter rejection that we saw last week when we saw Jesus hanging on the cross rejected, completely rejected by mankind and God.

In Mark 8 : 31 – 33 we see Jesus predicting not only his death but his resurrection.

We see here that Jesus clearly told his disciples that he was not only going to die, but would then come back to life three days later.

So from hearing this you might have expected the disciples and those close to be prepared for what was going to happen after his death.

However as we see in Mark 16 : 1 - 8 this wasn’t the case.

Here we see three women going to Jesus’ tomb on the Sunday after Jesus had been executed on the Friday. They were going to prepare Jesus’ dead body with spices to mask the smell, which was a common thing to do at the time.

They went to the tomb expecting Jesus to still be dead. However as we can see from the passage when they got to the tomb the situation was very different. The women were terrified when they saw Jesus sitting alive and breathing in his tomb.

There was a difference between God’s plan that Jesus told them to expect and then level of trust and expectation that they had in God to deliver this.

How do you think you would have reacted if you were with these women as they went into the tomb and saw Jesus (who they saw die on the cross) sitting alive?

Can you think of any dreams, ambitions or ideas that you have had that you thought were from God, or for his Church? How do you find trusting God for these dreams even when they seem really far-fetched?

So over the past few weeks we have looked at the whole Easter story. What we are going to do now is incorporate the key bits to create our own comic strips called “The man that defeated death”

God had a plan for Jesus to save us. Jesus knew this plan would be successful, even when his followers struggled to believe.

Easter Sunday is a time when we think about new life, it is spring time and blossom is filling the trees, plants are starting to shoot up and the days are getting longer.

In the shops over the past few weeks you will have seen aisles filled with chocolate eggs and bunnies, symbols of new life. For Christians the new life that we celebrate at Easter extends far beyond this. Easter is not just a time to think about fluffy bunnies, eggs and chocolate.

It is a time for us also to think of the new life that we have though Jesus’ resurrection. 2 Corinthians 5 : 17 says “Anyone who believes in Christ is a new creation. The old is gone! The new has come!”

This is far more than just a miraculous event, it was an event that changed the course of history forever. Through Jesus’ death God restored his relationship with us as his people once and for all. Since the beginning of time, the punishment for falling outside of God’s standards has been death.

However though the execution of God’s son, an innocent man, who had never done anything wrong. He took the punishment on behalf of everyone else in history so that we never have the face the punishment for living outside of God’s standards.

This is why we are called a new creation, because though Jesus death on the cross the log of our past actions has been cleared and it is like we are starting a fresh in God’s eyes as long as we believe and trust in him.

One thing that we do to symbolise ourselves being a new creation is to be baptised, like many people (will be/were) today. Baptism is a symbolic, reflecting the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Going fully under the water symbolises his death, and being buried in the tomb. With his death all of the bad things that we have done, that are against God’s plan were buried with him.

Then being raised back out of the water symbolises his resurrection. It also represents the start of the new life that we have being part of God’s family.

One of the most significant parts of baptism is acknowledging the things that we have done wrong in the past, and asking Jesus to wash us clean of our bad decisions in our past and in our future.

On one of these tissue people carefully write down something that you want to bring to Jesus and ask him to forgive us and wash us clean.

Jesus loves it when we come to him to say that we sorry and want to turn away from doing these things.

Let’s close with a prayer:

Lord Jesus,

We thank you that you not only died for us at Easter, but also came back to life, so that we can have a new start and a new life with you forever.

We are sorry for the bad decisions that we have made in the past and ask you to forgive us. In particular we bring to you the things that we wrote down a few moments ago.

We thank you that you love us want us all to thrive.

Help us to live our lives in a way that pleases you.

Amen